1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to network usage data. More particularly, the present invention relates to path discovery and analytics for network data.
2. Description of the Related Art
The process of analyzing Internet-based actions such as web surfing patterns is known as web analytics. One part of web analytics is understanding how user traffic flows through a network (also known as user paths). This typically involves analyzing which nodes a user encounters when accessing a particular network. In large networks such as, for example, large search engine/directories, billions of pageviews may be generated per day. As such, analyzing this huge amount of data can be daunting. Such analysis is needed, however, to determine common user behavior in order to optimize the network for better user engagement and network integration.
What is needed is a solution that efficiently discovers all user paths across a large-scale network.